NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) - Unigen Pharmaceuticals and the University of Prince Edward Island will work together to study marine microorganisms from the Atlantic Ocean with the hopes of making discoveries that may lead to new therapeutics and commercial products, Unigen said late last week.
The marine collection research will be led by Russell Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Marine Natural Products at UPEI, who has been collecting samples from tropical Atlantic waters for two decades.
Unigen will extract the microbes from the samples and fractionate them using a high-throughput purification system, and will test these fractions on "biochemical, genomic, proteomic, in vitro, in vivo, and ex vivo models," the company said.
The company said active ingredients will be "separated and identified as leads for the development of pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, cosmoceutical, and functional food products."